Like most geeks, I have a favorite editor. Unlike some, though, it’s not a religion for me. On my Mac, for years I’ve used and love BBEdit, which has been the King Hell editor in the Apple world for a long time. The advent of OS X allowed things like Emacs and Vim to make some inroads as some folks converted from Planet Unix, but BBEdit remained the “hometown” favorite for most the Mac hackers I know.

Well, comes now TextMate which, while perhaps not as fully featured or mature as BBEdit, does include some tempting tricks — like folding sections of a file, not to mention what is probably better integrated project management, plus bone-simple invocation of system commands from within the editor and some rather elegant and not at all “Clippyesque” smart-typing features. It’s cheaper, too, so I’m giving it a whirl.

Of course, the lack of a Perl syntax highlighting mode is off-putting (though I could roll my own pretty easily, it appears), and I’m vexed by the lack of a “normal” application preferences menu, so it’s not without its drawbacks. It’s also short on docs (outside of their site; nothing comes in the downloaded bundle), which is almost criminal, and its “project” construct isn’t as flexible as BBEdit’s new drawer feature (though in being less flexible, it actually offers features BB doesn’t, so it (like everything else [HDANCN?]) is a tradeoff). More subtly, I note (via this review) that it lacks a Print option, which somewhat puzzling, but presumably they’ll address this at some point.